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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2024

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  • Because that way they avoid any competition.

    Thing is, businesses like Google’s ads are not linear. If you can track 90% of people 90% of the time, your ads are much much more valuable to advertisers than a company that only tracks 70% of the people 90% of the time. So it makes sense to create a moat by literally shitting money on everyone around you.

    Think about the opposite: if Apple would switch to DDG by default, most people would leave it at that. And that would mean, a significant chunk of the US search traffic is gone. Europe and the rest of the world are not that apple-heavy, but Apple users are rich power users (on average), these are extremely valuable.


  • By tracking who sent what to whom?

    If you know the phone number of a Hisbollah member and they send messages to a set of pagers, these are likely Hisbollah pagers. If you do that to several phone numbers, you get a pretty comprehensive list of members. You don’t need to know, where exactly they are. That’s simply not relevant.

    And again: if it’s a supply chain attack, you don’t even need these contacts. Just a single entry point into the supply chain of the organization.













  • What’s really baffling to me is how completely irrelevant most ads are to me.

    And I’m not saying “ads don’t work for me”, I get ads for products that I will never buy. I’m a man and YouTube recommends me tampons, lipstick and perfume. I also won’t buy a car anytime soon, yet I get tons of ads for cars.

    Even in the mindset of an ad person, that can’t make sense. Sure, there is the off chance that I’ll buy lipstick for my girlfriend, but how likely is that and how much revenue will materialize from bombarding thousands of men with ads? That cannot be economically viable.

    The actually infuriating part is, that we’re still paying for it. And the vendors as well. Only Google profits. If a company spends more on ads than necessary, their products will get more expensive, and those who buy their products will have to pay for it. So essentially I’m paying money for being advertised to, so Google can rake in billions.


  • The long-term goal is for Rust to overtake C in the kernel (from what I understand

    Your understanding wrong. Rust is limited to some very specific niches within the kernel and will likely not spread out anytime soon.

    critical code gets left untouched (a lot of the time) because no one wants to be the one that breaks shit

    The entire kernel is “critical”. The entire kernel runs - kind of by definition - in kernel space. Every bug there has the potential for privilege escalation or faults - theoretically even hardware damage. So following your advice, nobody should every touch the kernel at all.